The Destiny of the Body

Chapter III

Survival Beyond the Tomb

Nachiketas says: "This doubt there is about a man who has passed: some say, '

He is'; some others, 'He is no more.' "

(Katha Upanishad, 1. 1. 20)

Yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?... If a man die, shall he live again?

(The Book of Job, 14.10,14)

I shall live even when I am dead, just as the solar God Re lives for ever.

(Egyptian Book of the Dead, Ed. Naville, Ch. 38)

Such then is the ineluctability of death, and thus is fixed in the calendar of time the dark date of its visit of dissolution.

But man, the rebel child of Nature, has refused to accept the finality of this fact; a son of Death, he has aspired to become the child of Immortality. Thus, in all ages and climes, he has believed with all the ardour of his heart that even if his body's death can bring an end to his physical terrestrial life, it can by no means make an end of his existence altogether. He denies any truth to the dogmatic assertion that he is merely an ephemeral spark of consciousness bubbling for a while in the eternal ocean of death and non-existence. Did not Victor Hugo represent the undying hope of humanity when he declared at the close of his life:

"I feel immortality in myself. I am rising, I know, towards the sky. The earth gives me its generous sap, but heaven lights me with the reflection of unknown worlds. You say the soul is nothing but the resultant of bodily powers. Why, then, is my consciousness more luminous as the bodily powers begin to. fail? Winter is on my head, but the eternal spring is in my heart. There I breathe at this hour, as I did at the age of twenty, the fragrance of lilacs and violets and roses. The nearer I approach the end, the plainer I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds to come. It is marvellous, yet simple. It is fairy tale, yet a fact. For half a century I have been writing my thoughts in

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prose and verse; history, philosophy, drama, romance, tradition, satire, ode, song — I have tried all. But I feel I have not said a thousandth part of what is in me. When I go down to the grave I shall have ended my day's work. But another day will begin next morning. Life closes in the twilight; it opens with the dawn."¹

This insistent refusal of man to accept the definitive validity of the sombre fact, the fact of his body's death that cannot in any case be denied as a practical fact, this age-long aspiration of the race for personal immortality — an aspiration that sprang up in the earliest obscure beginnings of man and has haunted him to this day, indicates indeed a subconscious awareness of something really pertaining to truth, something of the nature of a prophetic indication of the future destiny of evolving man. For, as we shall presently see in the course of our study, death and dissolution do not necessarily inhere in living matter as such nor are they at all in the nature of a universal phenomenon in the realm of the living. We may remember in this connection the metaphysical argument advanced by a character in a play of Addison in validation of the instinctive desire on the part of man for physical immortality:

"Plato, thou reason'st well,

Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,

This longing after immortaliy ?

Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror

Of falling into nought? Why shrinks the soul

Back on herself and startles at destruction ?

'Tis the divinity that stirs within us;

'Tis heaven itself that points out an hereafter,

And intimates eternity to man."²

However, as a stark and practical fact of existence, the bodily death has been till this day the ineluctable destiny of all men. Hence its awful and invisible presence has always tended to haunt and overshadow man's thought and life and action. He has variously sought to mitigate the pangs of his body's death, by considering it not as the end of the whole of his existence but rather

¹ Quoted on p. 26 of Immortality by A. W. Momerie.

² Cato.

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as a new birth, a sleep or a transition. After all, has he not witnessed with eager gaze a snake gliding forth young and new after it has cast its slough, or a beetle breaking away from its filthy sepulchre and entering on a new career, or a silkworm coming out, a winged moth, clad in the colours of the rainbow, from its cocoon wherein it lay as in a grave to all appearances dead? Has he not heard of the phoenix, the fabulous bird, that in old age surrounds itself with spices and sets light to them, soaring aloft, rejuvenescent from the aromatic fire? Straightway, man's love for the indefinite continuity of personal existence and his protest against the prospect of disappearing into nothingness, or sliding into the abyss of unconscious matter, takes the phoenix to be the symbol of his soul that too shall surely spring forth immortal from the remains of his corpse.¹

But metaphorical or analogical arguments cannot have much evidential value in support of the doctrine of persistence of one's 'spiritual existence' even beyond the grave. Hence man has sought to adduce some additional arguments to establish the fact that the physical death does not denote the total annulment of all conscious being. Leaving aside the elaboration of the intricate maze of reasoning adopted by philosophers and logicians, we may content ourselves with the bare statement, in the words of Professor Hammond, of the five traditional arguments that have been commonly advanced in favour of the doctrine of personal survival after the body's death and dissolution:

"(1) The ontological argument, which bases immortality on the immateriality, simplicity, and irreducibility of the soul substance;

(2)The teleological argument, which employs the concept of man's destiny and function, his disposition to free himself more and more from the conditions of time and space, and to develop completely his intellectual and moral potentialities, which development is impossible under the conditions of earthly life;

(3)The theological argument: the wisdom and justice of God guarantee the self-realisation of personal beings whom He has created;

(4)The moral argument, i.e., the moral demand for the ultimate

¹ See A. W. Momerie, Immortality, p. 18; Alger, Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life, pp. 38-40

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equivalence of personal deserts and rewards, which equivalence is not found in life;

(5) The historical argument: the fact that the belief is widespread and ancient, showing it to be deep-seated in human nature."¹

Whatever may be the logical validity of these arguments, the fact remains that man has variously viewed the phenomenon of physical death as a portal to a future and greater discarnate life, or as a temporary sleep and slumber from which he will rise into eternal wakefulness in some supraterrestrial world of bliss. He has even hoped for a resurrected body, or put his trust, as in the Pauline theology, in the development of a spiritual and 'pneumatic' body in his existence beyond death.

But all these views as well as other allied ones accept physical death as a settled fact of life and look forward only beyond the grave for any possible glory of the Spirit balking the material body's death and disintegration.

On the other hand, the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo seeks to realize for man a radical victory over physical death itself, achieved here in the conditions of the earth. So we must now consider the attitude of the Sadhakas practising the Integral Yoga of transformation vis-à-vis the problem of Death and Immortality.

¹ Quoted on p. 276 of Death: its Causes and Phenomena by H. Carrington and J. R. Meader.

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